Thursday, March 9, 2017

@InTheCLE

Spending the week as the voice of @InTheCLE which is “a citizen voice social media channel that lets Clevelanders share and promote their love for Cleveland via Twitter.” Basically, they pass off the handle to a different person every week, whose responsibility is to tweet early and often about what’s happening in the city.

From March 6 - 12, 2017 that’s me, they even swap your face in and so when I go back through the timeline I am surprised to see my face attached to things I did not actually tweet. Other InTheCLE contributors have a greater interest in sports or civic engagement, mine has a lot to do with promoting area theater.

This is not the first time I have done this, I was on InTheCLE last January, too. It was quite an education in Twitter, which I rarely used. I didn’t know the difference between a "Reply" and a "Quote Retweet" and why you would rather use one than the other. I was also obsessed with creating my own original content, and was unaware you could get away with retweeting interesting local news without having to comment upon it.

Because I have been taking this seriously (a little too seriously) I have been on Twitter A LOT this week and it’s a little disorienting. It’s funny, people will ask InTheCLE for a recommendation for something - say, a good vegan restaurant - and I feel it is my job to find out a million suggestions right away. I even use Facebook to poll my friends there, who are all too happy to offer their opinions, and then report back. Before I know it, I’ve lost a half-hour.

In the late 1990s, someone did an experiment where they holed up in a hotel room for a week or a month or something, and their only communication with the outside world was the internet. No TV, no phone, just the “world wide web.” If this person couldn’t pay for it with a credit card and have it delivered via internet, they couldn’t eat it. Video streaming was nascent - no DSL, so no movies. Watched a lot of porn, apparently.

Okay, so I’m not in that situation. I move freely through the world, but in the interest of providing original CLE-based content (once an hour is a goal) I have spent a lot of time scouring for interesting things to report, even if they don’t necessarily interest me. And, because the point is promote the city, my commentary should be positive, supportive. It’s a challenge.

Some people think the Browns management have made some very good decisions today. Others do not. I avoid politics. I try very hard to avoid politics. Twitter is a political sewer.

But it has also been invigorating, catching all the responses to Mayor Jackson's State of the City address today, if not the address itself. Yesterday, it was all about discovering, acknowledging and promoting woman-owned businesses for International Women's Day. I have also tagged several professional theater productions.

Anyway, the weekend is coming up. If you know of any interesting activities or special events in the Cleveland area coming up, please let me know.
Just tag @InTheCLE!

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Mission Statement

David Hansen is a playwright living and working in Cleveland Heights, OH. His work merges personal narrative with historical fiction, transforming daily life into myth and bringing great events to an intimate level.